Domestic Reporting Can Become Dangerous Fast

Street-level reporting is increasingly treated as a disruption to be managed, not a public service to be protected, with arrests, detentions, and assaults turning protest coverage into a predictable hazard. In the United States, journalists were detained dozens of times in 2024 and assaulted at far higher rates in 2025, often by law enforcement, while high-profile events and routine demonstrations alike revealed how quickly “public-order” policing can become a tool that interrupts coverage and chills follow-up reporting. Similar patterns across Israel and other democracies show a shared playbook, physical intimidation in crowds, equipment seizures, restrictive access, and charges that fall apart later, leaving journalists to absorb the cost while the public receives a thinner record of the moments that demand scrutiny most.

In countries that advertise themselves as press-freedom models, danger now sits at the edge of the police line. In the United States, journalists were arrested or detained dozens of times in 2024, nearly 90 percent of them while covering Israel–Gaza protests, yielding the third-highest annual arrest total since systematic tracking began. By the following year, assaults on reporters had climbed into the hundreds, with the vast majority attributed to law enforcement, many during immigration enforcement operations. Germany recorded nearly 90 attacks on journalists in 2024, roughly twice the previous year, with most cases clustered in Berlin. In the United Kingdom and France, unions and press-freedom groups now issue regular alerts about reporters being punched, kicked, gassed, and stripped of equipment at riots and marches. The street has become a hazardous beat in its own right, a place where documenting domestic politics carries a level of risk that once belonged primarily to foreign conflict.

The risks of street-level reporting have escalated even in countries that present themselves as press-freedom models. In the United States, the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker documented at least 48 arrests or detentions of journalists in 2024, exceeding the combined total for 2022 and 2023 and ranking as the third-worst year for arrests since the Tracker launched in 2017. A large majority of those 2024 arrests occurred at demonstrations over the Israel–Gaza war, and nearly half involved the New York Police Department, which turned the country’s largest media market into one of its highest-risk jurisdictions for protest coverage. At the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, credentialed journalists covering protests were arrested on charges such as failure to disperse and obstruction, only to see those cases dropped later, a pattern advocates describe as a process used as punishment.

By 2025, the environment had hardened further. An accounting by press-freedom groups and the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) cited 170 assaults on journalists in the United States that year, with roughly 160 attributed to law enforcement, many during coverage of immigration enforcement actions and related protests. Reporters and photographers have been hit by “less-lethal” rounds, shoved to the ground, pinned while displaying credentials, doused in tear gas at close range, and had cameras and phones seized, searched, or destroyed. Student journalists and local freelancers appear again and again in incident reports, often singled out while filming from the front line of campus encampments, street marches, and immigration-related blockades. Even when charges are dropped and detainees released the same day, the “catch-and-release” pattern removes them from the story, interrupts live coverage, and sends a visible signal that police can switch off reporting at the moments when public scrutiny is most intense.

In Israel, domestic reporting has also become hazardous work in its own right. During the Jerusalem Day flag march in June 2024, Palestinian and Israeli journalists, including Saif Kwasmi and Nir Hasson, were beaten and harassed by marchers while documenting the event, as security forces largely failed to intervene and, in one case, detained the injured Palestinian photojournalist instead. The same year, authorities ordered Al Jazeera’s local operations closed under a new national security law, raided its Jerusalem office in May, and then raided and shut its Ramallah bureau in September, seizing equipment and issuing closure orders that halted on-the-ground work for weeks at a time. These steps sit alongside heavy military censorship and a high number of Palestinian journalists in detention, which together tell domestic reporters that coverage of the war, the occupation, and security forces can trigger both street-level violence and state action against their newsrooms.

The same logic has taken hold across other democracies. In Germany, watchdogs have logged physical attacks on journalists and their equipment at political rallies and Middle East-related demonstrations. In France, reporters covering street protests have been beaten, tear-gassed, and shoved by police while filming, and in the United Kingdom, journalists documenting riots and far-right marches have been chased, punched, and had cameras smashed by protesters and bystanders. Across these environments, familiar tactics recur: kettling, crowd-control weapons used against clearly marked press, generic public-order charges that rarely survive in court, and the seizure or damage of tools that enable reporting.

These incidents do not stop with the injuries to individual journalists. When covering a protest, a march, or an immigration raid that carries a real chance of arrest, injury, or loss of gear, editors send fewer people into the field, instruct reporters to stand farther from the action, and lean more heavily on pooled feeds, wire photos, and user-generated footage that cannot replace independent observation. Street-level coverage becomes thinner and slower, precisely the outcome that officials and groups that resent scrutiny seek to achieve.

These incidents describe a methodical redesign of accountability reporting practices at home. In democracies that still claim to protect the press, the most contested moments in public life increasingly reach audiences through filtered images and secondhand accounts, rather than through reporters moving freely through a crowd with a camera or notebook. If that pattern hardens, the next generation of domestic politics will be documented mainly from behind police tape and government lenses, and the street-level view of power that journalism is meant to provide will narrow to whatever can be captured from a safe distance.

Continue to next installment: Online Harassment is No Longer Separate from Physical Safety.